Why is this article particularly interesting for this blog? It continues our theme of defending (legally) the cause of those who speak out on their beliefs in the supernatural or paranormal. Professor Levy discusses at pages 265-273 why those who believe they can commit murder or other criminal acts through witchcraft or other paranormal means could be defended through what he calls "causation impossibility." In other words, the defendant thinks it could happen that way, but it can't. Not guilty by reason of the world doesn't work like that.

I understand that those who already think lawyers are hired guns and amoral useless appendages will not see any use in Professor Levy's arguments, just as they may see the Fourteenth Amendment as a technicality. I do see merit in his position, and I see it from the point of view of the First Amendment. There is a great difference between thinking about committing an act, or believing that one can commit an act, and actually committing it. To work out where the line is is difficult, and scholars like Professor Levy are taking on that task. Further, walking down the road of punishing thought crimes, which is what Professor Levy is really warning against, is the stuff of Philip K. Dick's short story Minority Report. It may not just be science fiction. Taken to the outer limits (yes, I know--yet another pop culture reference), I could see an over-eager law enforcement arm using techniques like predictive policing coupled with anticipatory prosecution putting people away for the "great potential" of future terrorism, for example. As we see more and more teenagers and young adults enticed into the arms of terrorist groups, will we hear politicians and policy groups, and concerned citizens ask for just this change?

Joshua Warren is an attorney after my own heart. Well, I certainly hope he isn't literally after my heart. Mr. Warren is putting together a casebook on zombie law. According to Findlaw's Deanne Katz, "Warren claims he has over 300 federal court opinions that use the word 'zombie' which is more than enough for an imposing casebook to store on your bookshelf." Check out the project here.

I do believe that judges (and lawyers), frighteningly, use the word "zombie" and its derivatives that often. Maybe more often. Zombies can take on lives of their own, although they aren't supposed to. That's the point of zombification, isn't it? Ms. Katz makes reference to Adam Chodorow's Death and Taxes and Zombies, forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review.

Mr. Warren is offering a number of purchasables to fund his project; they look like fun. T-shirts, postcards and a photo of yourself as a zombie (you don't have to undergo the change--just the magic of digital transformation) can be yours: the transfer of negotiable instruments for swag.

I note that Mr. Warren is also interested in locating instances of uses of the word "ninja" in court opinions. Abandoning the rule of law completely? Similarly, uses of the phrase "cocker spaniel." Going to the dogs, are we?

Life and law and zombies. Put me down for a copy of the Warren casebook.

A used car dealer named Ruben Hernandez decided to try a little magic to fend off law enforcement officials who were getting too close with their warrants and charges of mortgage fraud and such. So he tried "black magic" and "voodoo," according to this account in L.A. Now. Prosecutor Eugene Hanrahan notes that one of the voodoo dolls "had my name" on it and was upside down in "this brown liquid." Yuck.

The dealer's attempts didn't work too well, since the judge (none other than the legendary Lance Ito) recently sentenced him to twelve years for various misdeeds. He tried to explain the use of the dolls as "spiritual acupuncture."

MSNBC.com offers this look at the latest in cryptozoology, packaged as a career for writer Loren Coleman. Mr. Coleman is probably best known for his association with the tv series In Search Of (2002 version). Also check out MSNBC.com's X-File Odysseys.

Prosecutors say a mother set her 6 year old on fire during a voodoo ceremony intended to drive out evil spirits. The girl's mother and grandmother didn't take her to the hospital until the next day, February 5th, according to the D.A. She remained in the hospital for nearly two months. The mother says the girl was burned accidentally while the mother was cooking. The girl is now in foster care, and apparently told her foster family about the incident; they reported it to law enforcement.

The Chronicle of Higher Educationreports that a much-anticipated paper with the intriguing title of “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience,” from a team of researchers at MIT and the University of California, San Diego, will now be published with the moniker "Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition." Apparently pre-pub criticism and discussion caused the change. The Chronicle provides links. It's all probably par for the course, I suppose, but the first title suggests not only a lot more fun with footnotes, but encourages people to read the article. Rats.

Via Lowering the Bar comes this extremely interesting story about French President Nicolas Sarkozy's lawsuit against manufacturer K&B Editions for selling a "Sarkozy voodoo doll" avec aiguilles that not only misappropriated his image but encouraged violence against him. A court agreed that the doll insulted the President's dignity, awarding him one Euro. The package including the doll must now carry a warning:

It was ruled that the encouragement of the reader to poke the doll that comes with the needles in the kit, an activity whose subtext is physical harm, even if it is symbolic, constitutes an attack on the dignity of the person of Mr. Sarkozy.

Now, this parody doll does make fun of Mr. Sarkozy. But to sue over it draws more attention to it than ignoring it would have done. Other K&B targets, including Segolene Royal, have not sued. K&B has sold out its first edition of the dolls and is ordering up more (these will carry the warning label). Further, the court's balancing of privacy rights and misappropriation against free speech and parody suggests that it was really at some pains (no pun intended) to figure out exactly where to draw the line here. It denied the injunction that the President requested, finding that such a remedy just goes too far. But it did award him a nominal amount in damages, and it required the defendant to pay legal costs. So the result is that the doll remains on sale, and will probably earn the firm lots more in customers and in publicity. Note also that the target of the lawsuit seems to have been the doll, and not the book it accompanies, Nicolas Sarkozy: Le manuel vaudou.

In the U.S., for example, I'm not sure a political figure, President Bush or Senator (and apparently soon-to-be Secretary of State) Clinton, for example, could win a suit for misappropriation of his or her image over the sale of such a doll. First of all, the image looks to me as if it's been transformed, at least a little, and that may be enough to protect it (see Comedy Three Productions, for example, and that line of cases). Second, this is political speech, and it's parody, protected by the First Amendment (see Hustler v. Falwell). Note, however, that Arnold Schwarzenegger sued an Ohio company over a bobblehead doll back in 2004; the suit was eventually settled when the company agreed to modify the doll.

Arguably, a political figure might say that the "subtext" here is physical harm, as President Sarkozy does. A user might intend, through a voodoo doll, to cause harm, if the user believes that harm can result. But according to voodoo theory, the doll must be authentic and created especially to affect the victim. I don't think K&B intends these dolls to cause the President physical harm (and the President doesn't actually argue that), because there's no evidence that K&B believes that the dolls actually can cause him harm. These dolls are manufactured en masse, not prepared in the traditional voodoo way intended or aimed specifically at a victim. Does President Sarkozy himself really believe that someone could cause him physical harm through use of these dolls? Does he believe that someone could cause him spiritual harm? Does he believe in voodoo? Is he suggesting that K&B's purpose in selling the dolls is to encourage people to think about harming him, other than to make fun of him? Obviously not, since he hasn't alleged that. He's clearly not happy that the company has reproduced some of his comments (including "Get lost you pathetic a***hole" to a voter who didn't want to shake his hand).

If that is the kind of harm he's complaining about, then perhaps politics isn't a good career for him, at least not in the U.S. Here, a court would probably not hear his complaint with much sympathy. "Generally speaking, the law does not regard the intent to inflict emotional distress as one which should receive much solicitude, and it is quite understandable that most, if not all, jurisdictions have chosen to make it civilly culpable where the conduct in question is sufficiently "outrageous." But in the world of debate about public affairs, many things done with motives that are less than admirable are protected by the First Amendment." Hustler v. Falwell, 485 U. S. 53 (1988).

What a U.S. politician might argue is that the buyer of the doll (not K&B) might advocate actual (as opposed to dignitary) harm to the real person represented by the doll. But even so, the political figure would have to overcome the Brandenburg elements--advocacy, incitement, imminent harm--in order to overcome a First Amendment defense. That, in my opinion, is pretty difficult, when you're arguing that the instrumentality of harm is a voodoo doll, and even if you are arguing that the act itself--using the doll--could encourage a third pary to another, more physical act. I won't get into whether an unhappy buyer, having discovered that the voodoo doll actually doesn't work, has a claim against the manufacturer.

Here's more on the Sarkozy lawsuit from the International Herald Tribune. Want to buy the Sarkozy doll and accompanying manual? It's available from Amazon France after December 15 (the site is sold out right now).